In this article, I explore the history, logic, and practice of capture among the Cofán people of Amazonian Ecuador. Rather than acting as the subjects of capture, Cofán people have primarily been its objects. Centuries of pre-Conquest, colonial, and postcolonial violence have exposed Cofán communities to repeated seizures by indigenous and non-indigenous aggressors. Although capture by enemy others is a feared prospect that typically brings disaster, it also serves as the Cofán nation's central means of acquiring violent powers, which are essential to its defence. By investigating the uncertainties of capture as a productive process, I question dominant representations of native Amazonians as wilful participants in a cosmos of generalized predation, and I issue a plea for openness when considering the diversity of the region's peoples.

Evidence of grand burials and monumental construction is a striking feature in the archaeological record of the Upper Palaeolithic period, between 40 and 10 kya (thousand years ago). Archaeologists often interpret such finds as indicators of rank and hierarchy among Pleistocene hunter-gatherers. Interpretations of this kind are difficult to reconcile with the view, still common in sociobiology, that pre-agricultural societies were typically egalitarian in orientation. Here we develop an alternative model of ‘Palaeolithic politics’, which emphasizes the ability of hunter-gatherers to alternate – consciously and deliberately – between contrasting modes of political organization, including a variety of hierarchical and egalitarian possibilities. We propose that alternations of this sort were an emergent property of human societies in the highly seasonal environments of the last Ice Age. We further consider some implications of the model for received concepts of social evolution, with particular attention to the distinction between ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ hunter-gatherers.

Dogs in the Moscow Metro, some say, have evolved a unique sentience: they navigate a human-scaled infrastructure and interpret human motives there. Such assertions about dogs, and encounters with them on public transit, invoke Soviet-era moral projects that wove sentiment (‘compassion’) and affect (‘attention’) through technical dreams: to erase material suffering and physical violence, to traverse the globe and the cosmos, to end wars and racisms. Dogs, after all, helped defeat the Nazis and took part in the space race. In the Metro now, their wags and barks stir debate about access and exclusion, resonating across assemblages of materials and meanings, social connections and signs. MetroDogs invite us to theorize the ways people extend connections in the moment well beyond the here-and-now.

Drawing has emerged as a recent focus of anthropological attention. Writers such as Ingold and Taussig have argued for its significance as a special kind of knowledge practice, linking it to a broader re-imagining of the anthropological project itself. Underpinning their approach is an opposition between the pencil and the camera, between ‘making’ and ‘taking’, between restrictive and generative modes of inquiry. This essay challenges this assumption, arguing that these elements in drawing and filmmaking exist in a dialectical rather than a polarized relationship. It highlights particular insights that follow from a dialogue between written and film-based anthropologies and links them to broader debates within the discipline – for example, debates about ways of knowing, skilled practice, improvisation and the imagination, and anthropology as a form of image-making practice.

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Drawing has emerged as a recent focus of anthropological attention. Writers such as Ingold and Taussig have argued for its significance as a special kind of knowledge practice, linking it to a broader re-imagining of the anthropological project itself. Underpinning their approach is an opposition between the pencil and the camera, between ‘making’ and ‘taking’, between restrictive and generative modes of inquiry. This essay challenges this assumption, arguing that these elements in drawing and filmmaking exist in a dialectical rather than a polarized relationship. It highlights particular insights that follow from a dialogue between written and film-based anthropologies and links them to broader debates within the discipline – for example, debates about ways of knowing, skilled practice, improvisation and the imagination, and anthropology as a form of image-making practice.Negotiating belonging: plants, people, and indigeneity in northern Australiahttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2F1467-9655.12206Negotiating belonging: plants, people, and indigeneity in northern AustraliaRichard J. Martin, David Trigger2015-05-28T02:20:12.29927-05:00doi:10.1111/1467-9655.12206John Wiley & Sons, Inc.10.1111/1467-9655.12206http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2F1467-9655.12206Original Article276295

This article focuses on human-plant relations, drawing on ethnographic research from northern Australia's Gulf Country to address the concept of indigeneity. Just as the identities of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘non-Indigenous’ people in this region are contextual and at times contested according to the vernacular categories of ‘Blackfellas’, ‘Whitefellas’, and ‘Yellafellas’, so too the issue of what ‘belongs’ in the natural world is negotiated through ambiguities about whether species are useful, productive, and aesthetically pleasing to humans, as well as local understandings about how plants and animals came to be located in the Gulf region. At the same time, plants’ distinctive characteristics as plants shape their relations with humans in ways which affect their categorization as ‘native’ and ‘alien’ or ‘introduced’. Focusing our analysis on three specific trees, we argue that attention to the ‘plantiness’ of flora contributes significantly to debates about indigeneity in society and nature. At the same time, our focus on human-plant relations contributes important context and nuance to current debates about human and other-than-human relations in a more-than-human world.

The article, based on in-depth ethnographic research in the El Paso, Texas/Ciudad Juárez area, is concerned with the ways in which liminal border zones become places of cultural transformation in which groups of individuals, rather than synthetically blending two or more identities, may attempt to downplay potentially harmful or restrictive uni-dimensional identities, evade past lives, and re-create themselves anew. The argument is twofold: the relative separation and distance of borderlands from national structures allows for a degree of cultural agency that may be less available to individuals closer to centres of cultural and political power; and border zones provide possibilities for reinvention, new relationalities, and other cultural creations and constructions that I call ‘escaping identity’.

This article ethnographically analyses how groups (and not just individuals) are produced in business process outsourcing (BPO) workplaces. In order to mitigate an unstable labour pool, corporations hire deaf workers to perform identical BPO work regardless of their qualifications and backgrounds. These hiring practices serve to cement existing relationships and produce deaf workers as a group marked only by deafness. This article explores how engaging in the same work articulates with deaf young adults’ ‘sameness work’ to produce ambivalent deaf groups. It also analyses the everyday practices of deaf employees, their relationships with their normal co-workers who ‘love’ them, and the ways that value is reconfigured in the workplace through the existence of disabled workers. This article argues that in contrast to dominant representations of disabled people as unemployable, the (re)inscription of deafness as a source of multiple forms of value begs for a broader analysis of the role of disability in late capitalism.

The article explores aspects of personhood as these emerge through rites of passage and culinary imagery in Batié, an eastern Grassfields polity in west Cameroon. Food appears as a gendered medium which, by being exchanged, cooked, and ingested by persons – and by collectives perceived as persons – has the power to transform others (persons and collectives) and make them act. Persons and collectives are revealed, at the different stages of their ceremonial journey, as the outcome of similar processes – exchange, cooking, and ingestion of food – occurring each time on different scales, and thus displaying fractal properties. Introducing a split between agent and (cause of) agency, the article finally suggests that agents’ successive (ritual) transformations are the result of their own actions as well as the actions of (‘individual’ or ‘collective’) others upon them.

In this article I explore the relationship between the secular and ‘cultural’ Catholicism in France through the lens of a contemporary art exhibit displayed at a new project of the French Catholic Church. Visitors’ varied responses to the exhibit, I argue, ultimately reinforced the organizers’ claim that the activities that occur within this ‘non-religious’ space of the French church are self-evident aspects of a broadly recognizable and ‘secular’ French or European culture.

This article engages with anthropological approaches to the study of global human rights discourses around reproductive and maternal health in India. Whether couched in the language of human rights or of other social justice frameworks, different forms of claims-making in India exist in tandem and correspond to particular traditions of activism and struggle. Universal reproductive rights language remains a discourse aimed at the state in India, where the primary purpose is to demand greater accountability in the domain of policy and governance. Outside of these spheres, other languages are strategically chosen by activists for their greater resonance in addressing individual cases of women claiming reproductive violence within the context of the family as well as localized histories of feminist struggle and social justice. In focusing on the work of legal activists and the discourses which inform their interventions, this article seeks to understand how the language of reproductive rights is used in the context of India, not as a `Western import' which is adapted to local contexts, but rather as one of multiple frameworks of claims-making drawn upon by legal activists emerging from distinct histories of struggle for gender equality and social justice.

Recent decades have witnessed a growth in approaches to research and writing across anthropology's four fields that emphasize the need to respect alternative narratives and constructions of history, and to engage with anthropology's ‘publics’. These developments have generated more ethically responsible research and more inclusive writing practices. Nevertheless, the actual doing of cross-cultural collaboration and knowledge production remains a challenge. In this three-field (cultural, biological, and archaeological anthropology) study, we aim to capture, in writing, a process of collaborative fieldwork with Samburu pastoralists in northern Kenya that experimentally integrated ethnographic self-scrutiny with a bio-archaeological excavation involving human remains. In the process, we highlight the reciprocal knowledge production that this cross-subdisciplinary, transcultural fieldwork produced.

In this article, I examine post-genocide Rwanda's gacaca process, in which genocide suspects were tried among their neighbours before locally elected judges. I suggest two limitations in how anthropologists have typically studied post-conflict legal institutions. Measuring the cultural relevance of law obscures contemporary imbrications of African custom and universal legal principles, and distracts from analysis of the politicized uses of culture. Analysing structural constraints and coercive dimensions, while crucial, can blind us to the very real social work that happens in these forums. Instead, I argue, what differentiated gacaca was how deeply it was contextualized – embedded in daily life, public, participatory, routinized, and based on oral testimony – and this contextualization formed the basis of its situated relevance to people's efforts to shape forms of sociality. People used gacaca sessions to negotiate the micro-politics of reconciliation, which included debating definitions of ‘genocide citizenship’, guilt, innocence, exchange, and material loyalty. I argue for moving beyond the underlying assumption in critical transitional justice studies that law and reconciliation are mutually exclusive, to acknowledge that the instrumental and often divisive dynamics in gacaca do not merely reflect institutional failures but, rather, reflect the inherent violence of social repair.

Calls for accountability and ‘impactful’ research are fundamentally reshaping the academy, giving rise to a large, critical scholarship on neoliberal regimes of accountability and their pernicious effects. But these calls also animate other institutional forms and practices that have received less critical attention. These include new forms of science that promise accountability through interdisciplinarity, collaborating with stakeholders, and addressing real-world problems. This article considers one example of such accountable science: human dimensions of climate change field research. This research endeavour has produced surprising results, including the uncritical adoption of controversial Euro-American ideas about traditional Others. In exploring how this has come about, the article considers how theoretical and disciplinary diversity are managed within this arena, and the organizing logics that enable climate sciences and scientists to work together. We ultimately argue that accountable science – like other neoliberal modes of accountability – can produce outcomes for which no one can be held to account.